The Night Side of London. James Ewing Ritchie
with annual incomes of £8064. If these two sums, making £29,064, be added to the former, it gives the enormous amount of £301,898 annually expended in medical charities in this metropolis; and this sum, large as it is, excludes Samaritan and other funds connected with hospitals and dispensaries, poor-law medical relief (£28,776), cost of maintenance of pauper lunatics (£79,988), vaccination (£4292), and nurses’ training institutions. All these sums would make a grand total of nearly half a million expended on our sick poor. The City Missionaries now number 325, and every missionary visits once a month about 500 families or 2800 persons. The Ragged School Union has its ramifications in every part of the metropolis. Their returns are 128 Sunday Schools with 16,937 scholars in attendance; 98 day ditto, with 13,057; 117 evening schools with 8085; and 84 industrial classes with 3224. London has 12 societies for the reformation of life and public morals with a total income of £11,583; 18 for reclaiming the fallen, and staying the progress of crime, with £35,036; 14 for the relief of general destitution and distress, with £23,880; 12 for the relief of specified distress, with £29,881; 14 for aiding the resources of the industrious, with £7246; 11 for the blind, deaf, and dumb, with £34,762; 103 colleges, hospitals, and other asylums for the aged (exclusive of Chelsea and Greenwich Hospitals, £83,047); 16 charitable pension societies, with £18,989; 74 charitable and provident societies, chiefly for specified classes, with £103,227; 31 asylums for orphans and other necessitous children, with £81,015; 10 educational foundations, exclusive of libraries, modern colleges, or proprietary schools, £93,112; 4 charitable ditto, with £13,300; 40 school societies, religious book, church-aiding, and Christian instructing, irrespective of government grants or establishments, with an income, taking the sale of publications, as much as £318,189. Mr Low gives the total number of charitable institutions as 500; Mr Mayhew puts down their number as 530. Then there are 100 temperance meetings held weekly. May we not hope that all these institutions have some effect, that by means of them some are reclaimed, and many saved?
The more direct religious agency may be estimated as follows. In the Handbook to Places of Worship, published by Low, in 1851, there is a list of 371 churches and chapels in connexion with the Establishment; the number of church sittings, according to Mr Mann, is 409,184; the Independents have about 140 places of worship and 100,436 sittings; the Baptists, 130 chapels, and accommodation for 54,234; the Methodists, 154 chapels, 60,696; the Presbyterians, 23 chapels and 18,211 sittings; the Unitarians, 9 chapels and about 3300 sittings; the Roman Catholics, 35 chapels and 35,994 sittings; 4 Quaker chapels, with sittings for 3151; the Moravians have two chapels, with 1100 sittings; the Jews have 11 synagogues and 3692 sittings. There are 94 chapels belonging to the New Church, the Plymouth Brethren, the Irvingites, the Latter-Day Saints, Sandemanians, Lutherans, French Protestants, Greeks, Germans, Italians, which chapels have sittings for 18,833. We thus get 691,723 attendants on divine exercises.
Those who know London life will know that I have not glanced at its darkest side: any man of the world will tell you infamies which I may not name here. I do not go so far as Mr Patmore, and affirm that in the higher ranks of life a young man is obliged to keep a mistress to avoid being laughed at; but I can conceive of no city more sunk in licentiousness and rascality than ours. Paris, Hamburgh, Vienna, may be as bad, but they cannot be worse. The poor are looked after by the police – visited by the city missionary; their wants and woes are worked up into newspaper articles, and they live as it were in houses of glass. It is true that one half the world does not know how the other half lives; but it is not true in the sense in which it is generally affirmed. Who ever has an idea that a pious baronet, taking the chair at a religious meeting in Exeter Hall, will prove a felon; that that house, eminent in the mercantile and philanthropic world, will sanction the circulation of forged Dock warrants; that that manager, about to engage in prayer at a meeting of directors, will turn out to be the manager of the greatest swindle of modern times? Who sees a dishonoured suicide in the patriotic Sadleir, or in the philanthropic Redpath a convict for life, or in the dashing Robson a maniac? If I tell you that respectable old gentleman now coming out of his club is going to inspect a fresh victim, whom some procuress has lured with devilish art, you will tell me that I am uncharitable; or if I point you to that well-appointed equipage in the Park, and tell you that that fair young girl that sits within has crushed many a young wife’s heart, and has sent many a man to the devil before his time, you will tell me I exaggerate: I do nothing of the kind. If I were to tell what most men know – what everyone knows, except those whose business it is to know it, and to seek to reform it – I should be charged with indelicacy, as if truth could be indelicate, and my book perhaps suppressed by the Society for the Suppression of Vice – if that abortion exists still. We are choked up with cant; almost everything we believe in is a lie. The prayer of Ajax should be ours, – Light – more light.
What are we to do? – to stand stock still, looking to heaven “with a frenzied air, as if to ask if a God were there?” One can almost believe, with George Gilfillan, that the earth needs a new gospel and a new manifestation of divine power. From this low estate who is to rescue us? Not the aristocracy, a barbarous institution, perpetrating barbarous ideas in our midst, – that work is not honourable; whereas all true civilization points us to the fact, that man is only happy and virtuous as he is steadily industrious; and thus our most uncivilized classes are our upper and lower, – our lords and ladies on one side, and our rogues and prostitutes on the other. Not our law-makers, who imprison our young lads in costly jails, where the criminals have luxuries denied to the poor; and then in Newgate, or at the public works, mix them all up together, that the comparatively innocent may learn to be adepts in crime. Not our religious, I fear, when, from the Archbishop of Canterbury down to Dr Cumming, the cry is, If you have a proper translation of the Bible you will destroy the faith of the people. Not our trading classes, becoming richer and more sunk in flunkeyism every day. But it may be that these —
“Are graves from which a glorious phantom may
Burst to illumine our tempestuous day.”
Whom am I to blame? Not the victims, but the fathers, and mothers, and divines, and schoolmasters, and governing classes. Father, you have given your bold, manly son an emasculated religion, – a religion that wilfully shuts its eyes, and will not look upon life as it is; and, immediately he goes into the world, away vanish all the pasteboard defences with which you childishly sought to guard him; and yet you will not confess that in inculcating religious creeds, – that in teaching children catechisms, – that in vaguely telling them to be good, – that in leading them to believe in forms rather than truths, you are only damming up for a while the passionate impulses of young blood, that they may ultimately exert a more tumultuous and irresistible sway. You take the little Arab of the streets, and, for acts of levity and wantonness which all boys commit, you send him to prison, at an age when you confess he is not a responsible creature, and then idiotically wonder that he turns out a criminal, and that he wars with society till he is hanged. You are surprised that woman, fond of praise, of dress, and pleasure, should prefer to walk the street in silk and satin, to have a short life and a merry one, rather than slave and drudge, and end her days after all in a workhouse. You tone down your fashionably educated daughters into automatons, and then wonder that hot youth finds domestic life tame and dull. Above all, do not go away with the idea that we have reached the utmost height of civilization, – that we are a model people, – that it is our mission to set up as teachers of religion to all mankind. Let us remember that the increase of crime and dissipation are facts; that there can be no corrupter city than London, and that it must be so, so long as we make professions our practice so scandalously denies. I have heard Her Majesty’s proclamation against vice and immorality read at quarter-sessions by men in whose reading it became a farce which the most ignorant bumpkin in court could relish. Now we are going to do wonders, the policeman is to supplement the parson, the wicked are to be hunted down. Is this the way seriously to set about moral reform? Routine and officialism in church and state have made the outside of the sepulchre white enough; do we not need a little cleansing within? How long will men look for grapes from thorns?
SEEING A MAN HANGED
I am not about to give an opinion as to the propriety or impropriety of capital punishments. On this point good men have differed, and will differ, I dare say, for some time to come. What I wish to impress upon the philanthropic or Christian reader is the horrible nature and atrocious effect of